From “Preface to ‘Prometheus Unbound’”

“Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.”

- P.B. Shelley

From “Smoke on the Mountain”

“For many contemporaries God has dwindled into a noble abstraction, a tendency of history, a goal of evolution; has thinned out into a concept useful for organizing world peace — a good thing as an idea. But not the Word made flesh, who died for us and rose again from the dead. Not a Personality that a man can feel any love for. And not, certainly, the eternal Lover who took the initiative and fell in love with us.

“Do you think that Christianity is primarily valuable as a means of solving our “real” problem — i.e., how to build a permanently healthy, wealthy, and wise society in this world? If you do, you’re at least half a materialist, and someday the Marxists may be calling you comrade.

“So strong is the materialist climate of opinion that even convinced Christians sometimes feel compelled to defend Christianity against the charge of “otherworldiness” — to slight its value as the passport to heaven in favor of its usefulness as a blueprint for remodeling earth. Yet we must not blame our earthiness entirely upon Western scientific progress, as if materialism had waited for Edison to invent it. By no means. The Rome of Lucretius, the Athens of Epicurus–even the Israel of Ecclesiastes–were hardly without their materialist philosophers. Devotion to the prince of this world is one of the ancient tempations, and perhaps our remote ancestors had no sooner invented the slingshot than they reared back on their hind legs and proclaimed that their technical progress had now enabled them to do without religion. The choice before us today is just what it always was–whether to be worldly or otherworldly; whether to live for the unloving self or to live for the love of God.”

- Joy Davidman

From “Les Misérables”

“Success: that is the message seeping, drop by drop, down from the overriding corruption.

“It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is History. Jvenal and Tacitus alone mistrust it. In these days an almost official philosophy has come to dwell in the house of Success, wear its livery, receive callers in its ante-chamber. Success in principle and for its own sake. Prosperity presupposes ability. Win a lottery-prize and you are a clever man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great. With a handful of tremendous exceptions which constitute the glory of a century, the popular esteem is singularly short-sighted. Gilt is as good as gold. No harm in being a chance arrival provided you arrive. The populace is an aged Narcissus which worships itself and applauds the commonplace. The tremendous qualities of a Moses, an Aeschylus, a Dante, a Michaelangelo, or a Napoleon are readily ascribed by the multitude to any man, in any sphere, who has got what he set out to get — the notary who becomes a deputy, the hack playwright who produces a mock-Corneille, the eunuch who acquires a harem, the journeyman-general who by accident wins the decisive battle of an epoch. The profiteer who supplies the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse with boot-soles of cardboard and earns himself an income of four hundred thousand a year; the huckster who espouses usury and brings her to bed of seven or eight millions; the preacher who becomes a bishop by loudly braying; the bailiff of a great estate who so enriches himself that on retirement he is made Minister of Finance — all this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They counfound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

- Victor Hugo

From “The Weight of Glory”

“Remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”

- C.S. Lewis

From “Leaven of Malice”

“I am increasingly reminded of Oedipus. Do you not recall that in that tragic history, Oedipus met a Sphinx? The Sphinx spoke in riddles — very terrible riddles, for those who could not guess them died. But Oedipus guessed the riddle, and the chagrin of the Sphinx was so great that it destroyed itself. I am but a poor shadow of Oedipus, I fear, and you, Mr. Yarrow, but a puny kitten of a Sphinx. But you are, like many another Sphinx of our modern world, an undereducated, brassy young pup, who thinks that gall can take the place of the authority of wisdom, and that a professional lingo can disguise his lack of thought. You aspire to be a Sphinx, without first putting yourself to the labour of acquiring a secret.”

- Robertson Davies

From “What the Cross Means to Me”

“Any personal statement on such a subject as the present is bound to be inaccurate. It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time, especially when that belief refers not to the objective fact but to subjective interpretation. A rhetorical adjective will create a false stress; a misplaced adverb confuse an emotion. All that can be hoped is that a not too incorrect approximation may eventually appear. And anything that does appear is, of course, to be read subject to the judgement of the Christian Church, by whom all individual statements must be corrected.”

- Charles Williams

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We never knew his fantastic head,
where eyes like apples ripened. Yet
his torso, like a lamp, still glows
with his gaze which, although turned down low,

lingers and shines. Else the prow of his breast
couldn’t dazzle you, nor in the slight twist
of his loins could a smile run free
through that center which held fertility.

Else this stone would stand defaced and squat
under the shoulders’ diaphanous dive
and not glisten like a predator’s coat;

and not from every edge explode
like starlight: for there’s not one spot
that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.

- R.M. Rilke (trans. H. Landman)